At this point in the season, with a number of teams looking to next year as their source for additional honours, I usually get a little nervous about how wise it is to be wagering essentially oblivious to that reality. This year is no different.

At face value though, the portfolio of wagers concocted by the Head-to-Head and Line Funds should make for an entertaining four days.

The mix includes a few swing-for-the-fences wagers from the Head-to-Head Fund on teams priced at between $4.50 and $11, another bet from the same Fund on a narrow favourite in the form of the Swans, and a fifth bet on the Crows that should be a collect about 80% of the time.

Those five are accompanied by six line bets, with the Line Fund choosing to go it alone, in a very small way, on the Dogs and otherwise wagering on the same teams as the Head-to-Head Fund in amounts ranging from 0.4% to 2.9% of the Fund.

Overall, these bets represent just over 8% of the Overall Portfolio and create a set of risks and rewards as shown at right.

The Lions hold sway over a potential double-digit percentage increase in the Overall Portfolio, but could also strip just over 2% from it should they lose convincingly.

Fremantle and Carlton wins would also bring sweet rewards for Investors, while losses would knock a little over 1% off the value of the Overall Portfolio. The potential gains and losses in all of the remaining games on which wagers have been placed, are fairly modest.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

But for Home Sweet Home and Consult The Ladder, the MoS Head-to-Head Tipsters would be unanimous in their opinions this week, which means there'll be no movements of any substance on the MoS Leaderboard.

There's also broad agreement amongst the Margin Predictors, though C_Marg finds itself Predictor Most Extreme in six games this week and has thereby recorded the round's highest mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 9.9 points per game.

Just four other Tipsters have MADs above 5, three of them MoSSBODS_Marg and the two ensembles based on MoSSBODS, and the other Bookie_3.

The game with the highest MAD is the Richmond v Essendon clash where it's 9.7 points per Predictor, followed by the Brisbane Lions v GWS clash, where it's 8.5 points per Predictor. The Saints v Dees matchup has the round's lowest MAD of just 2.4 points per Predictor, but is also the only game where there are Predictors on either side of zero, Bookie_9 bravely opting for a narrow Saints win. No-one, however, is predicting a Dees win by more than 2 goals.

Amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, C_Prob is the Predictor Most Extreme in six contests, and MoSSBODS_Prob is the same in five. Accordingly, they have the round's highest MADs.

Looking from a game-by-game perspective, it's the Richmond v Essendon game that has the highest MAD at 8.9% points per Predictor. The only other game with a MAD higher than 5% is the Sydney v Hawthorn match, where it's 5.4%.

MoSSBODS DETAILS

The Western Bulldogs this week are in the unusual situation of being a designated home team suffering the 3 Scoring Shot (SS) Travel Penalty, since their game against the Suns is being played at Cazaly's Stadium. From MoSSBODS' point of view, however, that fact serves only to reduce the predicted Dogs margin of victory to about 5 goals.

Richmond are also assessed as enjoying no net benefit from playing their Dons fixture at the MCG, though their underlying abilities are still sufficiently superior to have MoSSBODS tipping them as about 3-goal victors.

They also have three games producing over 180 points, with the Lions v Giants game tipped to be the highest-scoring at 207 points. The Blues v Eagles game has the lowest projected aggregate score of just 154 points. It will be interesting to see how much closer are MoSSBODS' projections to the TAB's this week.